Punjab Outlook

Guru Nanak, our founder Guru, was the most scientific, most logical, and most spiritual of thinkers. His teachings cut through superstition and blind ritual with razor-sharp reason, grounding faith in inquiry and equality. He rejected empty ceremonies, asked people to question rituals, and demanded they seek meaning rather than merely perform acts.

At Hardwar, when priests were flinging handfuls of Ganga water skyward for distant ancestors, Nanak quietly turned his back and began pouring water toward Punjab. Startled, they demanded an explanation. His reply was disarming: “If your water reaches the other world, why can’t mine reach my fields in Punjab?” With one simple gesture, he exposed the absurdity of mindless ritual and re-centred faith on reason and real life.

In Mecca, when a qazi rebuked him for resting with his feet pointed toward the Kaaba, Nanak said, “Then turn my feet in the direction where God is not.” The qazi fell silent. In that moment of honest logic, the claim of a single “exclusive” direction to the divine collapsed—because God is everywhere.

 

When caste-bound Brahmins claimed birth made them superior, Nanak asked a simple, human question: “Is not everyone born the same way, from a mother’s womb?” Dignity, he insisted, comes from deeds, not ancestry.

When some insisted that cutting the body marked faith, he challenged the premise itself: If the Creator made us imperfect and in need of alteration, what does that say of His creation? He rejected any ritual pretending to monopolise truth.

He looked at the cosmos and described the earth within a vast living order—air as the teacher, water as the life-giver, earth as the nurturing mother. Centuries before we had the language of ecology, Nanak taught that human life rests inside nature, not above it.

In every instance, Nanak placed reason over ritual, essence over form, and equality over hierarchy. His faith was open, fearless, rational, logical, scientific—and humane. Encyclopedia BritannicaSi

The Present Crisis
And yet, in today’s Punjab, we are drifting far from that spirit. The Punjab Police have registered an FIR against the Vice-Chancellor, Registrar, and professors of Punjabi University for “sacrilege.” Their crime? Disposing of error-ridden copies of Mahan Kosh—the encyclopaedia of Sikh literature compiled by Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha after 14 years of painstaking labour. Let us be clear: Mahan Kosh is not a scripture. It is an encyclopaedia that draws from the Vedas, Quran, Bible, riddles, music, philosophy, history, medicine, and geography; Sikh scholar Teja Singh M.A. called it “the most valuable book on Sikhism produced in modern days.” It was meant to inform, to educate, not to be worshipped. Encyclopedia Britannica

And yet today, university scholars are being branded criminals for following a government order to scrap defective copies—because a few groups equated an encyclopaedia with scripture and declared their “sentiments” hurt. This is not about Mahan Kosh. It is about the slow death of Sikh scholarship under the shadow of fear. The Times of IndiaDiscover Sikhism

Questions We Must Ask Ourselves
· Who will research Sikh history if every page carries the risk of FIRs?

· Who will teach Sikh literature if hardliners can brand them criminals for a printing or pronunciation error?

· Who will dare to correct mistakes when even correction is treated as sacrilege?

If fear becomes the price of knowledge, silence will be the only scholarship left.

We’ve Seen This Before
Those who lived through the peak of terrorism in Punjab in 1990–92 will remember. Hardliners issued diktats: shopkeepers were ordered to paint their boards only in blue and yellow—the colours of Sikh warriors. Many such orders were imposed. People obeyed out of fear—but inside, they detested it. And very soon, that era ended, because no society can live forever under suffocating control.

What we see today is another kind of diktat. Not with guns, but with the weapon of “sentiments.” Not by militants, but by self-styled custodians of faith. The message is the same: obey, don’t question; fear, don’t think.

A Dangerous Pattern
This FIR is not an isolated event. It is part of a larger pattern:

· A proposed sacrilege law, few even advocating punishments up to life or even death.

· Mobs emboldened to lynch in the name of “hurt sentiments.”

· Scholars and teachers silenced, afraid of even touching Sikh history.

If every book becomes scripture, if every question becomes an insult, what is left of Sikhism’s proud tradition of rationality and inquiry? Guru Nanak questioned rituals, authority, and dogma. Are we now so fragile that even an encyclopaedia threatens us? Encyclopedia Britannica

From “No Hindu, No Musalman” to the Khalsa — and Now
When Guru Nanak declared “There is no Hindu, no Musalman,” he wasn’t erasing anyone’s identity—he was calling people beyond labels to the oneness of truth, asking them to meet as human beings first. From that universal, rational beginning, the Sikh Panth grew around a living tradition of inquiry and ethical living.

Under Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, the Khalsa was founded—not to narrow Nanak’s message, but to protect it in a brutal age. The Khalsa fused spirituality with courage, equality with discipline, and turned a persecuted community into a fearless brotherhood of saint-soldiers. This institutional step was a response to a tyrant history. Today, however, we face a different test: will fear and factionalism hollow out the Panth from within? Encyclopedia Britannica+1

The real sacrilege is turning the Panth into a captive of loud hardliners, many sitting abroad, dictating to Punjab through noise and threats virtually choking the followers of Guru Nanak
The real sacrilege is making Sikhism—a faith born of courage and inclusivity—into a cage of fear.

At this rate, even the exclusivity of reading the Guru Granth Sahib will one day be claimed by the Pathis, shutting out ordinary Sikhs from their own Guru. Imagine the irony: the scripture written in the people’s language, meant to be sung and shared by all, slowly being locked away by a clerical elite. Reverence will become ownership. The Guru of all will become the property of a few. That is not Sikhism—it is its slow burial.

A Lesson from the Enlightenment
History offers a warning. In Europe, faith once ruled every sphere. Questioning priests could cost you your life. But the Enlightenment put inquiry at the center—Galileo, Newton, Locke, Voltaire—and society moved forward through debate and evidence. Sikhism, in many ways, was born with its own Enlightenment—Nanak’s fearless questioning, rational critique, and egalitarian vision. The world advanced by freeing knowledge. Punjab risks sliding backward by criminalizing it. Encyclopedia Britannica

Punjab must choose:

· Do we want a future where knowledge thrives, or one where knowledge is criminalized?

· Do we want our children to learn Sikh history with pride, or with fear?

· Do we want universities to research, or to live in silence?

The story of terrorism taught us one thing: people may obey diktats for a while, but in their hearts they reject fear. That rejection ended militancy. The same will happen again if we allow hardliners to turn faith into a whip.

Sikhism was born out of freedom, not fear. If we surrender scholarship to those who thrive on threats, then we betray Guru Nanak himself.

The question is simple—will we let the Mahan Kosh be remembered as an encyclopaedia of knowledge, or as the tombstone of Sikh scholarship?